All posts in category liberal democrats

Who is going break the news to David Cameron? The Conservative party’s chairman Baroness Warsi has been caught campaigning for the Tory candidate in the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election.

Warsi’s activities appear to be in direct contravention of the latest orders from Cameroon central. They are that the Tories, regrettably having to put up a candidate, should try and do everything to ensure their coalition partners the Lib Dems win the seat. Even though it’s a three way marginal, which the Tories might be able to win if they tried, Cameron wants above all to avoid the possibility of a Labour win boosting Ed Mili’s faltering leadership. So the Lib Dems are being given Tory assistance.

Oldham is really a dry run for Cameron’s hoped for future electoral collaboration between the two parties. That much was clear in the joint Dave’n'Nick’s press conference held at Number 10 on Tuesday.

Colin Firth is the patron saint of British niceness on film. Somewhat reserved, with a dry sense of humor and dead eyes, the actor specializes in looking resigned and stoical when he has been badly let down. In “Love Actually” he is betrayed by his wife and gets so annoyed that he storms off to go and have a good sit down in his house in France. In the Bridget Jones films he is let down on multiple occasions but keeps calm and carries on (apart from one scene, where he rolls around in a fountain with love rival Hugh Grant).

In real life, Firth has been the best known celebrity backer of the Lib Dems (after Floella Benjamin)—but no more. He has withdrawn his support in the wake of the tuition fees vote, reports The Guardian. He said that the Lib Dem election promise not to vote for a rise in tuition fees was one of the reasons he had backed the party before the election and said students were right to feel let down.

Burning with rage, Firth said of Nick Clegg: “I do believe he did what he thought was the only choice at that time given the parliamentary situation.”

Vince Cable opened for the government in the tuition fees debate in the commons earlier and he had a pretty torrid time. The Business Secretary struggled at points and battled to keep his cool as Labour MPs barracked and almost constantly tried to intervene. At one point, when he turned to the coalition benches for some support, he got nothing but unhelpful questions from Conservative MPs.

In contrast, Cable’s shadow – John Denham – was listened to much more respectfully. Many Tory MPs seemed happy for Cable to get a tough time and for Denham’s beating up of the Lib Dems to be heard.

Why? There are Tory MPs who are loving the public torturing of their coalition partners. A minister told me it was “an impossible situation for the Lib Dems”, but he wasn’t frowning, he was smiling. It is not difficult to find other amused Conservative MPs who relish Clegg and Cable’s troubles. And not just the usual older suspects, younger members too.

Some Tory MPs will tell you that for years, decades, they have fought the Lib Dems in various parts of the country and claim they play dirty while taking the moral high ground. Now their former opponents and new partners in government are in a terribly tight spot, having promised at the election an “end to broken promises”. The Lib Dem parliamentary party seems to be split about four ways. What’s not to like if you are a Tory MP, or a Labour MP, with a strong Lib Dem presence in your constituency?

The Lib Dems have worked hard at burnishing their newly acquired reputation as a party of government that deserves to be taken seriously.

The “I agree with Nick” excitement of their election campaign didn’t lead to lift-off for the party but it helped rescue seats in a difficult election where they might otherwise have been squeezed. The party leadership then handled the coalition negotiations well, getting as much out of the panicked Tories as they possibly could (which involved discombobulating the Conservatives to such an extent that Team Cameron forgot that Labour and the Liberals never had the numbers for a rival deal.) The Lib Dems then threw themselves into government with enthusiasm and determination. Their Tory colleagues have found Clegg and other senior figures such as Danny Alexander to be impressive operators.

And now all this. Tuition fees. The word “farce” is sometimes over-used in political journalism, but what other word is appropriate when one seeks to describe the party’s last 48 hours in the spotlight?

Consider the following:

1) A grinning Don Foster MP turns up to address a sizeable crowd of protesting students. The crowd chants abuse at Mr. Foster (“shame on you for turning blue”) before he says that he still hasn’t decided how to vote on tuition fees because he is “still listening to the arguments” . All this is filmed by the BBC and shown on the evening news.

2) A Lib Dem MP has his constituency office occupied by protesting students and then says that he will now vote for the government, as a protest against the students who occupied his office. It is unclear whether or not he is joking.

3) Royal Marine Lord Ashdown is dropped into the middle of the crisis and appears at one point to blame the public: “At the moment they [the public] are just not listening… Nick could deliver the Sermon on the Mount, they are just not listening.”

4) Norman Baker says he has three options on the table ahead of the tuition fees vote but that he hasn’t yet decided. Was there a fourth option, which involved not going on the television to admit that he doesn’t know what to do? It appears not.

Nick Clegg is having a horrible time. His home has been targeted by protesters, he has been petitioned at his children’s school gate, his effigy has been burnt in the street where he lives and his family is entitled to feel at times like it is under siege. It must be terrifying. No wonder the man looks so exhausted. He and his wife have chosen, much to their credit, to remain living outside “fortress Whitehall”, to stay in the family home and try to ensure that his children have an upbringing unaffected by his being Deputy Prime Minister. They should be left alone to get on with it.

An under-pressure Clegg has started to attract considerable sympathy in some quarters, and much praise from centre-right leaning commentators (suggesting he is doomed as a receptacle for left-of-centre votes). Matthew Parris wrote on Saturday that his ideological instincts are closer to Clegg’s than they are to a good many other Tories. (Incidentally, and I think I followed him correctly, Parris seemed to say that Clegg was not a Eurofanatic, which might be stretching it. In January 2009 the Lib Dem leader said that Britain’s response to the financial crisis should probably involve joining the Euro. “The strict rules attached to the euro could emerge as one of the best ways to persuade the markets that we will put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Clegg said. Is there a condition one stop short of Eurofanaticism? Euromania?)

In recent days it has been almost impossible to open a newspaper without reading a piece praising Clegg’s intellectual and political bravery. Lord Ashdown, talking for once in public about someone other than himself, said Clegg has been has been “wise and courageous” on tuition fees. Hmmmm…

Whilst one abhors the violent attacks and menacing behavior by a minority of Clegg’s critics, can we put the leader of the Lib Dems progress to sainthood on hold?

It’s a simple question of principle deserving a yes or no answer, surely? The Lib Dems and Nick Clegg have long been enthusiasts for Britain joining the single currency but for some strange reason I haven’t heard them or him mention it much recently. The word “Ireland” springs to mind.

Earlier this week, one of my colleagues telephoned his people in Whitehall to ask whether Nick Clegg is still in favor of Britain joining the euro, now or at some point in the future. The coalition agreement rules out membership in this parliament, but presumably after that the Lib Dem leader is still up for it?

Clegg certainly seemed very sure of the euro and its prospects in this exchange with Gideon Rachman in Prospect back in 2002.

And here is Clegg in January 2009, suggesting that Britain joining the euro might be a way to help get the public finances back in order:

“In that context of people just longing for clearer rules, for reliability, for stability, for certainty, you might just find that becoming part of the reserve currency on our doorstep might become part of the recipe … by which we put the British economy back together on a more sustainable footing … The strict rules attached to the euro could emerge as one of the best ways to persuade the markets that we will put Humpty Dumpty back together again, put the public finances in order.”

This week his spokeswoman took some time to come up with an answer and in the end would say no more than the following: “It is a theoretical question and it is not a decision for now.”

Labour’s Douglas Alexander had a good line in the “Daily Politics” PMQs post-match analysis. He said that Nick Clegg’s answerphone message should say: “Please speak after the high moral tone.”

The Deputy PM was standing in for David Cameron at PMQs and opinions differ on how he did. I thought he struggled a bit. He didn’t command the House or succeed in lightening the mood, as Cameron usually does several times in his weekly half-hour outing. Labour MPs will admit privately afterwards that the Tory leader is good on his feet.

But what jarred most was Clegg’s somewhat pious tone when he came under fire on tuition fees. His party has shifted its position 180 degrees since the election, when its campaign committed to opposing any increase in fees. The coalition is recommending a steep increase and the Lib Dem leadership now approves.

Couldn’t Clegg say, with a little humility, that this is one of the prices of power and even perhaps acknowledge that he and his colleagues hadn’t quite thought through the implications of their pre-election stance? Nobody is perfect, not even Nick Clegg. Their most vehement opponents wouldn’t let up, but many others would credit them with being realistic and even humble.

But when discussing the subject, Clegg retains the impossibly high moral tone he favored (on many subjects) during his years in opposition. Adhering to a logic that mortals struggle to grasp, with great impatience he insists (as though explaining it to children) that the new policy is somehow in keeping with the old. When it isn’t. It is difficult to see this approach having widespread appeal.

What a by-election this is going to be. Phil Woolas has lost in court in the leaflet-related hoo-hah, and his election result has been declared void. A new election will now follow.

Labour appears to be in a complete panic. Ed Miliband made the mistake of appointing Woolas to his front-bench, rather than waiting to see how this case worked out. Whoops.

This farce is a gift for the Lib Dems, surely? In normal circumstances that might have been so. But the situation is slightly more complicated, thanks to the Cleggist forces having taken the Cameron shilling.

Consider the number of votes recorded in the election in May. Labour scored 14,186 and the Lib Dems were a close second with 14,083. So that’s straightforward. Labour will collapse in the wake of the court case and the Lib Dems will hoover up their votes and win? Perhaps not.

The Lib Dems have handled coalition very well. Their ministers are enjoying being in power and their recent party conference was more successful than those of the two larger parties. Nick Clegg seems to have convinced his party, or the larger part of it, that the only way for the Lib Dems to play their hand is to stick with his approach, then hope in 2014-2015 that there is enough vindication and economic uplift to entrench the idea of three-party politics and coalition in the minds of voters.

Along the way there will moments of embarrassment, such as when the party has to agree to policies that contradict what was in their manifesto. It is even worse in the case of tuition fees, about which a great many Lib Dem MPs signed a pledge guaranteeing they would vote against a rise in their level if a dastardly Tory or Labour government got in. But the Tories didn’t make it to power alone. And amusingly the proposals in the Browne report on higher education funding look like they will be implemented by Lib Dem ministers. Oops.

Understandably, there are howls from Labour–although it was a Labour orchestrated review that has come up with this plan to hit students with much higher fees, and a Labour government that introduced fees in the first place. How should Clegg and Co. deal with the situation? They don’t have much of an option other than to “like it or lump it”, as the PM apparently put it.

But Vince Cable, Saint Vince the supposed Sage of Twickenham, has actually responded in a rather endearing, disarming and unconventionally frank fashion. He says his party has changed its position in the light of economic circumstances: “We are not in an ideal world.”

There’s a phrase you don’t hear very often in public from politicians. Standard procedure involves one side saying that a policy is brilliant, and the other saying that no, actually, it’s not brilliant and it may even be the end of the world. We’re not in an ideal world? It could catch on.

Vince Cable’s advisers are learning the hard way about the perils of pre-briefing the press on a party conference speech the night before it is delivered. They have woken to headlines declaring that Cable has declared war on capitalism, no small undertaking.

The business secretary has already had to go on radio this morning to try and correct the impression that this was his intention. Contrary to all the lurid quotes from his speech about his plans to look into the murkiest aspects of corporate behavior, he insisted that he is pro-enterprise and pro-market. It looks as though a rewrite of the speech will be required before it is delivered.

Confused? Cable’s intent seems to have been to throw some red meat to the Lib Dem conference on its final day in Liverpool. It has been, in Lib Dem terms, a rather dull and well-ordered affair. So he and his speechwriters ramped up the rhetoric, and in doing so have obscured a serious point.